Even as a child, with no knowledge or interest in the more horrific stories that the world had to offer me, I was aware of the name: Stephen King.
The moniker felt more like a title, really. A ruler of the written word— a titan of horror. I remember seeing ‘Stephen King’ above a novel’s headline and feeling a rush of fear based on the author’s name alone; all without ever having read a single word of his writing or seen even a frame of one of his films.
As the years passed and I grew older, I came to be familiar with some of the more iconic imagery from the films inspired by his work. The visage of Jack Nicholson peering through a broken door. The image of a black cat, staring forward menacingly with flashing eyes. The razor sharp teeth of a clown who appeared to be anything but funny. Nightmares that only served to fuel my belief that horror should be avoided at all costs.
My first real experience with Stephen King’s work arrived in the summer of 1994 when my Dad let me stay up to watch Mick Garris’ adaptation of The Stand. To be honest, I don’t think I knew that it was a Stephen King adaptation at first, I was merely excited to see the prime time special that everyone seemed to be talking about. From the opening shot, I was riveted. As I watched over the next several days and learned that it was based on a novel by Stephen King, my perception changed completely. This was a creative just as interested in character as he was in scares, a voice that put believable, realistic people first which made the epic horror mythology at play all the more disturbing when it came to pass.
Over time, I discovered the many films and novels credited to his name. His voice permeated all of them, distinct and direct with a penchant to punch you in the gut when you least expected it. But no novel of King’s lived up to that sentiment, for me, more than Pet Sematary.
Unrelenting in its ability to face and feel raw, corrosive grief, the book haunted me for months after I’d finished it. The family in the story felt real and their loss equally so, which made the events that transpired within those pages sting in a visceral way that I wasn’t expecting.
The film follows suit, as Mary Lambert carried the book into the visual medium with style and raw emotionality. The characters feel lived in and believably flawed, unsuspecting in light of the horrors which life is clearly gearing up to hurl at them. The success of the film is all the more clear when considering the fact that Stephen King himself wrote the screenplay, bringing his straight-forward, conversational style to the table and providing a blueprint for a distinctly accurate filmic experience in regards to the source material.
Still, there are many stylistic and structural deviations when comparing the film to the screenplay. The script, for example, breaks up the events of the story into 5 titled “Chapters”, the segments feeling more like vignettes telling the story of a life rather than one, long uninterrupted account. Another alteration comes in the form of Gage’s death which, as written in the script, is intercut with the boy’s funeral, crafting a truly disturbing montage of grief that is less about the shock of the moment and more about the unyielding power of grief’s terrifying grip.
In the end, much of the tone and story mechanisms remain onscreen. The dance between Stephen King’s words and the visual outcomes is a nuanced and effective one, with few sequences representing the manner in way the film detours and yet honors the page better than that of Jud’s demise.
Tense and terrifying, Jud’s confrontation with Gage in the final act of the film is tautly directed and composed to create a conclusion to the character that’s equal parts visceral terror and depressing reality. Stephen King approaches the screenplay as if he’s describing the events onscreen to a friend, really landing the nature of the visuals on display and leaving a lasting impression in the reader’s mind. The film takes the ideas on the page and forges an iconic encounter that perfectly summarizes the film’s creed that dead is better.
THE SCENE
Jud awakens and enters his house, attempting to discover who has entered without his consent. He calls out several times, making his way upstairs. He believes he hears Gage, checking through the window to peer at his neighbor’s house before making his way to check under the bed. He’s startled by the loud call of Church, his neighbor’s resurrected cat. A small hand brandishing a scalpel emerges from under the bed and slices his ankle open. Jud falls, screaming. Gage, now monstrous, reveals himself and attacks Jud, slicing him across the face and growling intelligibly. Gage bites down into Jud’s neck as the life begins to leave Jud’s eyes. When Gage arises, he takes a chunk of Jud’s neck along with him. Jud sputters and dies, staring terrified upward, his jaw gaping.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
EXT. JUD, ON HIS PORCH
More deeply asleep than ever. Suddenly, from inside, comes the sound of Quiet Riot singing/screaming “Bang your head.” It’s the stereo, and boy, is it cranked.
From the word go, the screenplay presents the actions and characters in a less wooden manner than is the norm. Even the scene heading leads into the action description, showing less an interest in form and more a drive to engage. The words are conversational (consider the aside “and boy” for example) and serve to transport the reader into the story.
The screen deviates, opening with an extreme close up on Jud’s mouth, which stirs as the camera moves up to his eyes, opening wide in the wake of a loud commotion coming from inside his house. No Quiet Riot is heard, despite the film establishing Jud’s love of Classic Rock earlier on in its runtime, simplifying the old man’s paranoia to the foreign sound coming from his home.
The image jumps to a high angle shot of the muddy footsteps leading into his front room, following Jud in a continuous motion as he enters the space and takes a look around. The screenplay calls for Jud to hurry in and spends some time describing his state-of-the-art stereo in contrast to the more traditional furnishings of the room. As written, after he shuts it off, Todd Rundgren, singing “Bang on the Drum All Day” resounds from an adjacent room.
Again, the film opts not to build tension by way of hammering rock music and instead creates a relatively quiet soundscape, peppered with intermittent noises and odd fits of childish giggling. From the hallway, in the same continuous shot, Jud turns into the living room, watching as a ball bounces across the floor from stage right in a medium-wide shot.
The long take and the way in which the camera allows the framing to evolve into a wider scope of view, creates a sense of paranoia in the space. As if anything could be waiting, just out of sight. The sound of the ball is startling and is followed immediately by the high pitched laughter of a child and the pitter-pattering of small feet. While the screenplay continues to have Jud explore the origins of each new loud rock song that starts, the film halts his actions as he calls out:
“Who’s here?”
Gage laughs again and responds in the film, with words originally unscripted:
“Let’s play hide and go seek!”
The image cuts to a close up of Jud. He turns. His expression is serious and stricken with a dark look of knowing. The perspective of the camera jumps back and forth between close ups of Jud and his own point of view, providing a lens into Jud’s uncertainty that matches the conversational nature of the screenplay. A second strange commotion follows, junk loudly toppling down the stairs (as opposed to Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ with Disaster” in the script), and Jud addresses his unidentified intruder once more:
“Gage? Are you the one playing games?”
Jud makes his way upstairs, again depicted by a combination of close ups and POV shots. Interestingly, at this point in the screenplay Jud has yet to acknowledge Gage, and it comments:
Let me suggest that there is a certain psychology at work here— for the moment he’s more concerned about waking up the neighborhood with all this high-decibel rock and roll than with the prowler…and he would certainly know who—or what— that prowler was, if he had time to think.
Breaking the wall of the narrative to directly address the reader, the script offers insight into the naivety of the old man and the mental lack of priority that exists in his emotional headspace. The film differs by allowing the narrative to catch up with him almost immediately, as though fulfilling the contract that was put in place the moment he led his neighbor up through the deadfall to bury a dead cat.
In the film, Gage’s laughter greets Jud as he steps into his bedroom. The dialogue plays out as scripted, Jud attempting to coax Gage into revealing himself. The view cuts to a medium-wide of Jud as he removes a pocket knife and unfolds the blade. There’s more laughter from somewhere in the room and Jud snaps his head toward the bed. The scene plays out quickly, Jud making his way to the bed and slowly attempting to unearth what is hidden beneath it.
SOUND: Miaow!
INT. THE DOORWAY, WITH CHURCH, JUD’S POV
In the film, the cat appears from behind Jud, not the doorway, but the effect is the same. A close up shot of Jud shows his surprise. Simultaneously, the film treats the viewer to their first real glimpse at the new Gage, a pale white hand emerging slowly from under the bed, exactly as scripted:
A small hand holding a scalpel shoots out from beneath the skirt of the coverlet and slashes JUD’S calf.
The film breaks this sentence up to continue the ratcheting of the tension, infusing Jud’s scripted line and several shots of the cat before going through with the strike. Jud starts:
“How did you—?!”
But before he can finish, his face distorts in surprise and pain. The unmistakable sound of metal slicing flesh gurgles in the background and that’s when the image cuts to a scalpel already sliced deep into the meat of Jud’s ankle. The thing pulls away with an unpleasant squelch just as blood starts to bubble up from the wound buried in the old man’s achilles tendon.
The frame continues to jump back and forth from close up to close up, providing a view of Judd as he slips painfully out of frame. The camera no longer stays with him, rather lets him fall, a victim of his own poor decisions. The image cuts to yet another close up of his blood-covered hand, blindly inspecting the wound on his ankle. While the screenplay describes a quick struggle between Gage and Jud, the film allows the moment to be more quiet and eerie— Gage does not need to pull Jud down, Jud has fallen and is awaiting his fate.
That’s when Gage makes his full debut, post dying. As the action description so succinctly puts it:
This one’s gotta be pretty rough.
Gone is the pretence of expected storytelling form in the script, in its place only brutal honesty which guides the reader to a visual that is far more powerful in the imagination than it might’ve been with any specific combination of words. As written:
We finally see GAGE, but it should be clear to us that it’s not really GAGE at all. Some daemonic presence is riding inside the mouldering, disfigured shell of GAGE.
The boy wears a stoney expression, incredibly pale with a long, misshapen, off-center scar meandering down his all-too-young face. He looks barren of humanity and like anything but the child the body the thing inhabits presents itself to be.
What follows is a quick and efficient attack, brought to life by a series of close ups depicting a fearful, injured Jud, a small hand gripping tight to its scalpel and the visage of Gage, his teeth clenched in a sort of snarling fury. As the screenplay puts it:
There is a struggle. JUD is repeatedly slashed with the scalpel. Perhaps he gets GAGE a time or two with the pocketknife.
The screenplay provides no concrete description of this encounter, even suggesting that the attack is so frenzied and emotionally barren that the specific details of it are almost impossible to discern in a theoretical way. Rather, that when it comes to life, the minutia of the occurrence will reveal itself.
In the film, a second swipe slices through Jud’s open mouth, cutting the skin across the edges of his lips. He cries out, whimpering and sputtering, again falling to the ground. In keeping with the mounting claustrophobia of the sequence, all of this is depicted in close ups. The viewer sees his sputtering face, his grasping hands and Gage’s cruel face.
In the screenplay:
JUD expires.
GAGE sits on top of him…and then bites into his throat.
In the film, Gage throws himself against Jud’s neck before the moment of defined expiration, devouring his old neighbor’s flesh while the man is still alive to notice. While the script is concise in its description of the bite, the film adds a bit of nuance, showing Gage rise, tearing a large chunk of Jud’s flesh off as he does. Jud’s hands go limp and his eyes stop twitching.
We leave Jud staring up into the darkness, his mouth agape and his eyes full of terror. There is a sense of agony apparent in the dead man’s expression that goes beyond the pain and suffering he has just experienced, a damning sensibility that reaches down into his very soul.
While the screenplay ends the scene with the bite, the film leaves us with a shot of Church. A close up of the resurrected cat with the glowing eyes as it presides over the events in Jud’s bedroom knowingly, suggesting that what has just occurred there is only the beginning of what will be a very long night.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
Child of horror or not, Stephen King was a figure that managed to permeate my consciousness. The stately nature of his surname aside, he always held the prominence of a ruler of the genre in my young mind and one that I feared long before I had any concrete reason to.
Pet Sematary lives up to the Stephen King reputation and then some. Not only does it deliver on the terror associated with the name, but it provides a razor sharp perspective on the nature of grief, showcasing the author’s unique ability to bring grounded, realistic characters to the most outlandish genre infused predicaments. Few sequences call more attention to this notion than when the kindly, patriarchal figure of Jud Crandall faces off against the monstrous form of his reanimated 2 year old neighbor, Gage.
“It’s so scary to see his little hands,” director Mary Lambert said on the commentary track found on the blu-ray mentioned previously, “his real, little, perfect, beautiful hands picking up that scalpel and not knowing what his face looks like.” In the commentary, she describes the process of transforming Gage and how important it was to keep the actor physically in the scene.
“Another idea was to use a puppet, and we do use a puppet occasionally… but even in the scenes where we use a puppet we also use the real actor. And the cuts back to the real boy are what keep you from feeling you’re watching a puppet.”
What Mary Lambert describes is precisely why this scene is so adept at bringing Stephen King’s vision to startling life. Gage’s realness, his physicality is so palpably realized that Jud’s reactions are steeped just as much in trauma, shame and grief as they are in fear. At one point during the production, the idea of prosthetics for Gage’s face was floated and even attempted. In the commentary, Mary Lambert talks about how they took “hours to apply” and that ultimately Gage’s natural face was far more disturbing than any make-up effect could ever be.
The scene is an amalgam of ideas, as is often the case, deviating from the beats in Stephen King’s screenplay that lead Jud to his doom while still remaining in line with the emotion and character responses present in the text. The words felt as though they were coming from a confidant, informing me of what should generally be filmed but not dictating the events definitively. The style and mannerisms in the writing are wholly unique and yet completely in line with the raw, colloquial Stephen King tone one associates with the author’s work.
The effects in the scene are sparse, but impactful. A deep slash in Jud’s achilles tendon is shown for a matter of seconds but remains one of the most striking shots of the film. Gage’s make-up is limited to a pale-painted face and as Mary Lambert points out “just the one, little scar on top of his head”, but he still feels like a fully realized monster.
While his reputation preceded him, it was The Stand that brought Stephen King’s voice into my world, his name and work broadcasted across the country for all to see. He was ushered in by an industry and entertainment culture that recognized the value of his work, the worth of character driven horror and the importance of sharing stories which allow us to safely explore the darker corners of our world as a collective so that we might properly digest it. Pet Sematary is no exception, offering invaluable insight to the reality of grief and the cost of avoiding it, all of it encapsulated in the scene which occurs between Jud and Gage toward the end of the film’s runtime.
There are many avenues that lead to the world of Stephen King. But, perhaps, the master himself lays out the roadmap best in the “Stephen King Territory” special feature:
“The way a really frightening story should work is a lot like this path,” he said, motioning to the dirt path used in the Pet Sematary film, “I think it should be a bright, sunny, well-defined place that eventually is gonna lead the reader or the watcher into the woods and away from the path and, finally, to the deadfall.”
It’s one thing to know the deadfall is out there, it’s another entirely to climb beyond it. How lucky we are to live in a world where Stephen King offers us a glimpse at the other side so that we don’t have to take the trip ourselves.
There’s a reason everyone, horror fans or not, know who he is, after all, and I think it’s safe to say: more than his name, it’s his path that they revere.
Pet Sematary (1988): Written by Stephen King & Directed by Mary Lambert
